A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Walsh administration to allow the St. Patrick’s Day parade to march along its typical route through South Boston, saying the city’s attempts to shorten the parade, even if for safety reasons, interfered with the First Amendment rights of the organizers.

“This case does fall in a matter of constitutional protection,” said US District Judge Richard G. Stearns, citing US Supreme Court cases that have found that parades, like other forms of free speech and assembly, are a “public drama of social relations.”

Chester Darling, an attorney for the parade organizers, suggested the city’s attempts to shorten the parade were politically motivated; parade organizers have been at odds with Mayor Martin J. Walsh in recent years, based in part on the mayor’s failed attempt during his first year in office in 2014 to negotiate the inclusion of gay and lesbian veterans, who were allowed to march last year.

Darling noted that the city for the first time this year requested an insurance binder and entertainment license.

He called the city’s attempts to shorten the parade an “abuse of discretion by a heavy-handed mayor. He stamped his little feet and didn’t get his way.”

Boston’s police commissioner, William B. Evans, took issue with the claim, and said from the witness stand during Tuesday’s emergency hearing in federal court that he was the one who asked the mayor to adopt the shorter route — the same route the parade followed in 2015, when record snowfall clogged city streets....

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